RE:Shamanic Healing...
On Sat. Nov 22, you wrote (re my experiences as a witch and shaman):
>Could you tell us more about that. I'am very interested in Shamanic Healing.
I'll answer that in a separate posting... It's complex.
and to my talking of my experiences of self-healing you asked:
>What did you do exactly, precisely, and so ;-) ??
>Please describe the "rewire the addictive pathway"
This is quite a long posting I'm afraid...
I'll do my best to explain what I did and how it works, but please
understand, I learned this in the context of magick rather than NLP or
psychotherapy and therefore I don't really have the language to describe it
in NLP terms.
The basic technique works through the metaphor of memory as a woven/knitted
fabric. Our memory of an event is a complex fabric of all the sensory input
we received at the time the event happened, so we can change the memory by
"unweaving" it and then "reweaving" it with different threads. This is in
effect what happens with aversion therapy: a particular behavior becomes
associated with an umpleasant experience and the behavior is avoided to
prevent the unpleasant sequelae. Antabuse makes a patient sick if they drink
after taking it. In theory, the patient will avoid alcohol so as not to
become sick -- in practice they avoid antabuse, not alcohol, because the act
of getting drunk is triggered as an effect of deeper associations and
Antabuse does nothing to break the connection between the deeper feelings
and the (ab)use of alcohol.
I had a core memory of being abandoned. It was a pre-verbal memory of being
cold and wet in my crib in the dark and crying and no-one coming. Associated
with that memory was the feeling that this was not the first time this had
happened. This core memory led me to feel intrinsically worthless and
unlovable and was a major contribution to my alcohol and drug abuse. It also
contributed to my ability to get into relationships with abusive people.
This memory had surfaced a couple of times in therapy and although we had
talked about it, we had not managed to disempower it. The shamanic work I
undertook went as follows:
First of all I did the basic "protective" work of ensuring that there would
be no disturbances, created a circle, and called the elements and Inanna
(one of my patron goddesses). If anyone's interested in more details of this
part of magickal work I'll happily expand on them.
Within that circle I went into an extremely deep trance -- so deep that the
observer itself was in trance. I then sought out the memory and cast another
circle to isolate it from the rest of my mind. Inside the inner circle I
relived the memory as completely as I could and examined it in minute
detail. I was suprised to find anger in it as well as the despair and fear I
knew were there. When I had a complete understanding of the composition of
the memory I dismantled it then rebuild it replacing the sense of
abandonment and loss with that of being heard, held and loved. Because I
could not make it feel right by putting my mother's presence in it, I
rebuilt it with me being the person who comforted my child-self, basing that
on the reality of my not leaving my son crying in the night (and I could
never understand why I was so adamant about not leaving him to cry). When I
was comfortable with the feel of the memory -- it needed to be as powerful
and as authentic as the one it!
replaced -- I reconnected it to t
he rest of my memories and dismantled the inner circle. I then spent some
time testing the reconnections and looking at the differences in the way I
felt as a result of the change in the core memory. Finally I came up out of
trance, and took down the outer circle.
Interestingly, writing about this technique and this particular
implementation of it, I can't find any trace of the "old" memory. My core
memories now are of being loved, cared for, valued, and nurtured. The change
in the core has spread to cover a wider area of memory. I have lost the
sense of inadequacy, of not being good enough, of deserving ill-treatment,
of being flawed and along with this I have lost the need to self-medicate to
relieve these extremely painful feelings.
This tendency for the change to spread is one reason for the very tight
separation of the memory to be changed from the rest of memory. The metaphor
I was taught is that like knitting, if you drop a stitch large pieces of the
fabric can come undone. You must make sure that you do not leave any loose
threads or dropped stitches. To do so can cause large areas of memory and
personality to become unwoven, with potentially disastrous results. An
acquaintance of mine who used this technique managed to develop complete
amnesia, to the point where he regressed to the level of a toddler who could
scarcely feed himself, was not toilet trained and could barely speak.
Needless to say he was hospitalized and as far as I know still is. Last I
heard of him, about 5 years after the event, they had managed to toilet
train him and teach him to feed himself.
For the addictive pathways I undertook a similar exercise, only this time
there was no core memory to change. I used the metaphor of rewiring a
circuit board, cutting connections and making new ones. Making sure that I
put in plenty of checks (e.g. "do I want this?" before accepting a drink or
"what do I want to drink" or "am I thirsty") into the new circuits. It was
harder in a way, because it was so much more diffuse, not an easily
isolatable core memory.
There are a couple of caveats to this technique: First it is potentially
dangerous, and should not be undertaken lightly. Secondly I'm not sure how
best to use it on someone else. I suppose that through hypnosis you could
guide a patient to do the work, but you would need to do it in several
sessions. It would take considerable work to fully identify the components
of the memory -- after all you need to look at all the sensory input.
Perhaps building a parallel memory then deleting the original later would work.
Blessings,
Jen